I live next to the Palais des Congres, basically ground zero for homelessness in Montreal because it’s a public space so unless someone gets violent or annoying to the public they’re left in peace. For the most part the homeless don’t bother the residents, and vice-versa.

But it’s really depressing. Once you see someone new hang out here, you get to see them grow old really quickly. The general population thinks that “they messed up their lives with drugs”, which is true in some cases, but in most cases it’s the reverse — imagine that you have nothing to do all day (who’s going to hire the homeless?) and nowhere private to go to, ever. Well then, drugs quickly become the cheapest ticket to feeling good, no matter in how limited a capacity. They don’t have any “entertainment options”. Even assuming that a lot of them go to the Old Brewery Mission at night, the mission closes during the day, so they come right back. There are 2-3 distinct groups, overall they seem to respect each other’s “turf”.

Thing is, the general population — “normies” — really have no idea how close they are to being in this situation themselves. Yeah, we all dream of being millionaires or whatever, but we’re all infinitely closer to being out in the street than we are to owning a big yacht. One illness, one screw-up at work, one mistake in behavior, and that can be it. Much as people like to lie to themselves about this type of utter destitution being due to moral failings, unless you’re born into old money you’re probably teetering on the edge of that existence.

Yes, there are government programs. But we need to recognize that every year those programs are less funded than the previous year. Since the 1970s the percentage of the tax burden assumed by corporations and rich people has been on a steady decline, and that of “normies” has been rising. That started in the USA, but Canada quickly followed suit, because “we must be competitive”.

Well, “being competitive” sounds great as long as you’re on the side of the “winners”. But it necessarily also means that every year, there are more and more people on the “losing” side of the equation. It’s a sad reality.

That’s capitalism for ya.

The post On Homelessness in Montreal first appeared on The Clever Shark.

Of course as someone who tends to like all things Montreal, this had my curiosity.

Surprisingly for a Canadian whisky, this is not a rye. It is made from 80% corn, 10% wheat and 10% barley from St-Constant, on Montreal’s South Shore. It’s not a single malt, it’s a blend, and it’s a bit pricey for a blend ($48.25 for a 750ml bottle). However, at this point I felt it was worth a try for the curiosity if nothing else. Frankly I was only picking up booze for cooking, and if this is sold at the SAQ it can’t be so bad that I couldn’t use it for cooking. The 3 years barrel aging had me a little skeptical, but again I felt it would probably do the job for the dish, and, well, a native Montreal whisky was worth trying. If only for a bit of a lark.

Buying this kinda reminded me of April 2013. On March 31st I had begun to walk the West Highland Way with my great friend Jay. I had spent months preparing for this, as much as I could do after my fire-related accident and skin graft. In fact I had prepared for this walk so well that I had greatly weakened my right heel, to the point where at some time during the hike it fractured. We weren’t able to do the whole walk and used a combination of a train and a lift from a very helpful man we met at the bothys near Ardlui who took us to Crianlarich to remove 30km from the route and, to be honest, compensate for my bad planning. The estimations I had made to determine where we were going to stay along the way were horribly, horribly off for the first two days of the hike. We took a train from Crianlarich to Tyndrum to shorten the trip and the 3 remaining days of walking went as scheduled… but the whole time my right foot kept getting more painful. I had picked up some diclofenac in Switzerland on the way in and I was taking triple doses just to deal. By the time we reached Fort William I could barely walk, but we were done with the hiking and heading to Ireland for a car tour so I just dealt with it.

Anyway, one thing we hadn’t done while we were in Scotland was visit a distillery (!), but there is one in Fort William at the end of the Way, the Ben Nevis distillery. At the time for some reason they weren’t doing tours but we went to the shop and I saw bottles of Loch Lomond Scotch Whisky. I knew I had to get a bottle of that. I taught myself to read at 5 with Tintin comics, and if you’re also a fan you’ll remember that Loch Lomond whisky is Captain Haddock’s drink. He’s always drinking the stuff. I wasn’t impressed by the “8 years aged” marking but it was quite cheap. And it was a bit of a lark. Well it was pretty awful and just tasted unfinished, but that didn’t stop Jay and I from drinking the whole bottle a week later in Belfast the night before we flew back to our homes.

What’s the point of this whole story? To be honest I kinda lost track of that early in the anecdote. This whisky (Rosemont) has me “feeling ways about stuff” and I feel that’s an important quality in a decent whisky.

And, well, Rosemont is a decent whisky. It’s quite smooth even when drunk neat. In fact, if I’m quite honest, it tastes a little light. However it does not have that “unfinished” taste that I detected in the Loch Lomond. It is not peated and reminds me of a highland kind of whisky. Strong hint of vanilla with a caramel finish, no unpleasant aftertaste. It has a relatively dark robe.

This one has my seal of approval. This is not a mind-blowing whisky, but it’s also not priced like one, and if you’re looking for something Canadian that tastes pretty good and won’t break the bank, I encourage you to give it a try.

The post Rosemont Montreal Whisky first appeared on The Clever Shark.

Only when you get there there’s something on your windshield… a parking ticket. At 11:35pm on a Thursday.

And then it strikes you that there is a bunch of data entered on there and do a bit of math in your head, and realize that the parking warden must have seen you wrangling with the kid, the dog and the luggage, and then swept in, issued the ticket, and disappeared again like The Flash.

That pisses me off.

I’m not saying that people should be expected to help me out when I’m struggling with something, but when it’s clear that I’m just taking care of the fam and dropping people off it seems like bad faith for some asshole to just sweep in and deliberately kick me when I’m down. And if that’s the kind of people that the City of Montreal hires to monitor street parking, well, that just sucks.

I’m really curious to see exactly who it is that would be such a jerk, so I’m thinking that maybe I should establish exactly who it is by taking and posting photos  — I have a front-facing apartment so that shouldn’t be so difficult — and maybe one day confront this person and tell them about my concerns about how they’re doing their job.

Anyway I’m still pissed off. Maybe I should let my dog poop on the City Hall lawns and not clean it up… I really feel like I need to get some retribution here, $102 worth of it. That’s potentially a lot of poop.

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Seriously, I was waiting at a red light for at least 30 second with my turn indicator on. Meanwhile you were riding next to the sidewalk, hidden from my view by a number of large roadworks cones. You did not stop. You did not slow down. In fact if it weren’t for the fact that I, yes I, was paying attention to my blind spot when I turned in, you would have been seriously hurt. Especially since you weren’t wearing a helmet. I suspect that’s because you don’t have much to protect up there.

And then you had the balls to yell at me, you dumbass inbred motherfucker. I flipped you the bird and honked my horn at you because frankly I did not feel it would have been appropriate for me to turn off my engine, get out of my car, and give you the shit-kicking that you absolutely and definitely deserved. I was in the middle of the road and had a job to get to, you stupid cunt.

Watch where the fuck you’re going you moron. I hope you burn a red light and get hit by a semi or a bus. Why that choice of vehicle? Because either of those can run you over and not be overly damaged or cause another accident as a result. You are a fucking menace to everyone on the road and the sooner you are forced off it the better off this city will be.

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It’s not because I don’t like spending money on shiny new things — I most certainly do — but with the iPhone Rogers is laughing all the way to the bank with a lot of suckers’ money. Let’s look at the hard data and see what obtaining an iPhone with a decent plan would cost me:

• the phone itself, the 16GB version: $299
• the minimum plan during the time-limited “only until September” promo: $35
• fee for 6GB of data transfer per month (a package with the $35 plan): $30

So that’s $300 and $65 a month which is not cheap but not so bad, you’ll think… but wait, there’s more. Because for $35 you’re getting 150 weekday minutes and unlimited nights/weekends, but one thing you’re not getting is voice-mail. Surely you’ll ask, what sort of idiot doesn’t have voice-mail these days, and you’d be right. Therefore…

• voice mail package: $15

You might be able to get away with paying slightly less by settling for the “baby” plan with 400MB of data transfer per month — which would be reasonable for an ordinary phone — but this is an iPhone. The reason you’re getting it is to use the GPS (which relies on Google Maps and is therefore bandwidth-intensive) and to be able to check out web sites and YouTube clips while on the go. You’re going to need the additional transfer capacity, and once you go over your 400MB it’s $0.50/MB for the first 60MB over, then $0.03/MB after, so the initial $20 savings will most likely end up costing you quite a bit more more in the long run. In fact if you use 441MB of bandwidth on the baby plan you’ll end up paying more than if you had paid for 6GB of bandwidth from the start, a phenomenon I have affectionately dubbed “the great Canadian wireless data ripoff”.

So that’s $80 a month. But we’re not done yet, there are a couple of additional fees that apply to any account:

• network access fee: $7
• 911 fee (not for having called 911 because I haven’t, but in case I should need to): $0.50

So in fact the monthly bill isn’t really $65, it’s $87.50. That’s a serious amount, even for someone like myself with a good job and my own business. And it doesn’t stop at $87.50 either because I would of course have to pay all applicable sales tax on that amount. Here in Quebec it’s 5% GST + 7.5% PST (calculated on the original price + GST), which brings the total to $98.77 per month. And the phone itself will chime in at $337.50.

So, almost $350 for the phone and practically $100/month for phone service, and that’s for a full 3 years. When you look at it this way, it’s not surprising at all that I don’t have an iPhone and most likely will continue not having one. In fact it’s a bit of a mystery as to why ANYONE in Canada would carry one of these things around.

The post iPhoneless first appeared on The Clever Shark.

Fortunately this can, in fact, be done. The PVR terminals sold by Videotron have at least two interfaces you can use to connect an additional storage device. When you do the PVR will format the storage unit you have connected to it; when the PVR is restarted, the disk’s capacity is combined with the capacity of the internal disk. This extends your recording capacity.

The PVR has two interfaces that are used for this purpose: a Firewire/IEEE1394 port, and an external SATA (eSATA) port. It is recommended that the eSATA port be used as it offers much higher bandwidth and throughput rates. Moreover a lot of affordable, consumer-level external drives have recently come on the market offering eSATA as an interface.

Choosing a fast interface is particularly important if you like watching a lot of high-definition television. The Videotron PVR uses its internal hard drive fairly constantly to decrypt the HD signal, and when you add an external disk the external disk is used for signal decryption. When viewing an HD channel I can see the “activity” led on the drive flash pretty constantly; when viewing a standard-definition channel the activity becomes very infrequent.

What’s more, if you use an external disk with a poor throughput the delay in decryption processing can cause rather annoying “hiccups” in HD playback when watching live television. For some reason I have not noticed this effect when watching a recorded HD programme.

So, if you want to really extend your recording range, I’d recommend a disk with a 7200RPM rotation speed, and preferably connected to the PVR using as short a length of eSATA cable as you can find. Right now I’m using a standard desktop disk in a Thermaltake BlaX hot-swappable eSATA adapter, which is very practical and versatile but potentially not the fastest interface you can get. I’m guessing that a Seagate FreeAgent 1TB or a LaCie D2 1TB Big Disk would offer the best money for value, as you can get either for less than $250 nowadays. Note that depending on the disk you buy you may have to purchase the eSATA cable separately.

How to do it

1. Attach the disk to a running PVR. You will see a message that the disk has to be formatted; push the A button to format the disk.
2. Shut down the PVR. for best results, you should then disconnect the power cable from the PVR and reconnect before proceeding.
3. Restart the PVR. You will see a message that the attached disk is now used by the PVR. Note that until you see this message, your recording range has not been extended.

That’s it… it doesn’t get much easier than that.

This technology, although it’s been present on Videotron PVRs since at least 3 years, is not officially recognized nor endorsed by Videotron. Other cable providers tend to disable those ports, but Videotron does not (as far as I know). So, if you experience problems while using an external disk their tech support services will most likely not be crazy about dealing with them and may refuse you support. Should this happen, simply disconnect the external disk, see if the problem still occurs, and proceed accordingly.

Something else to keep in mind is that you cannot transfer a portable disk between PVRs. If you do, it will have to be reformatted before it is used in the “new” PVR.

If anyone else has done this before and can offer pointers, please do get in touch.

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